The Kriegsstammrolle (Bavarian Military Rosters Part 2 of 5)

The Bavarian Military Rosters – What were they? What does it say?

In Part 1 – Cousins, Countries, and War – I spoke of the discovery of a German soldier with my great-grandfather’s name – Josef Bergmeister. This particular Josef came from the same town my great-grandfather was born in – were they related? Thanks to a new group of records available on Ancestry.com, I was about to find out. But first, what are these records? What information do they have? And more importantly – what do the German words mean?

[Note: A subscription to Ancestry.com is required to view these records. If you do not have a subscription, check on availability at your local library.]

The main search page (image shown above) for the Bavaria, Germany, WWI Personnel Rosters, 1914-1918 is found here. Whether you search for a surname or for a particular individual, you will notice what appears to be more than one entry per person in the search results. For example, a search for “Josef Bergmeister” resulted in the following hits:

Based on the birth dates and town names, there appear to be records for two different men named Josef Bergmeister. Why are there several records for each? Because these personnel record books, or Kriegstammrolle, were kept for each military unit. If a soldier was transferred to another unit, he was recorded in the personnel records for the new unit as well as the old. In addition, there is a separate roster for the soldiers who died. To get a soldier’s full story, you should look at each of the search results.

Fortunately, the personnel rosters seem to follow the same format. Each book has two pages with fifteen columns of information. The following images show the column headings and the English translations.

Now that we know what the columns mean, how do we actually read a handwritten record?

Coming up in Part 3 we’ll transcribe and translate the service record for Josef Bergmeister. As you can see from the information above, the record will tell us quite about about his life as well as his death.

This is great. I have one that I was trying to translate. Now that I know what the roster heading are in English, all I need is someone to transcribe the handwritten information so I can figure out the family and parents information. It’s not very legible and I’m not familiar with recognizing German names.

This is not as easy as it sounds. I had no luck translating some letters from this period until i found out that the old script was called “suetterlinschrift.” Go to http://www.suetterlinschirft.de/Engisch/Tips_and_tricks.htm for the best help I’ve found, but it’s still slow going with Google translate. Good luck! PF